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Friday, December 21, 2012

This Is 40

By Pamela Zoslov

If this is 40, Judd Apatow, give me 37.
Or 65 and a half. Just don't let me be the age at which you're a
spoiled, affluent suburban couple screaming and whining about Viagra,
hemorrhoids and mortgage payments while driving your deluxe BMW and
cavorting at a pricey resort.

That the same Judd Apatow who gave us
brilliant episodes of The Larry Sanders Show in the '90s and
the endlessly hilarious KNOCKED UP is responsible for the
unendurable THIS IS 40 is both baffling and depressing. Either
Apatow never was as clever as we thought, or more likely, success –
as a writer, director and head of his own production company – has
compromised his talent. According to a recent New York Times
profile of Apatow, THIS IS 40, about the travails of
middle-aged marrieds and featuring his real-life wife and children,
is semi-autobiographical. If that's so, Apatow must live the
shallowest life imaginable. In tackling this subject matter, Apatow
doesn't need to be Cassavetes or Bergman – he just has to be
funny. THIS IS 40is
sour, strident and decidedly unfunny.

Apatow's signature, which has filtered
down through his many productions and their descendants directed by
others (including FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL, THE FIVE YEAR ENGAGEMENT, I LOVE YOU MAN, BRIDESMAIDS) is the
offhand, improv-style conversation, a technique that at its best –
in KNOCKED UP -- is
hilarious. (I am so fond of this style I even coined an adjective,
“Apatovian,” for it.) There are multiple attempts to wring laughs
out of this technique in THIS IS 40,
involving gifted comic actors Albert Brooks, Melissa McCarthy and
Jason Segel, and all of them fall flat.

Apatow's
primary subject is young adult males who refuse to grow up and are
forced by the women in their lives to grow up. Seth Rogen in Knocked
Up, after impregnating one-night
stand Katherine Hegel, is forced to give up his shiftless stoner
lifestyle and be a dad; Nerdy Steve Carell in The 40 Year
Old Virgin must become an adult
after meeting eligible middle-aged Catherine Keener. The heart of
the comedies, though, is male friendship. In part, that is why THIS IS 40, a two-hander about the
intimacies of married life, doesn't work. Apatow is a successful
family man, but onscreen, he doesn't do male-female relationships
particularly well.

THIS IS 40centers
on minor characters from KNOCKED UP,
Pete and Debbie, played by Apatow alter ego Paul Rudd (in a hairstyle that makes him look like The Three Stooges' Shemp) and Apatow's
wife, the appealing Leslie Mann. KNOCKED UP
found Pete complaining about the responsibilities of married life and
hiding his secret hobby (fantasy baseball) from his wife. In THIS IS 40, he's still evading
responsibility, hiding from his wife and two daughters by sitting on
the toilet playing Bejeweled Blitz on his iPad -- thereby
embodying two of the movie's dreary obsessions: modern electronic
gadgets, and anuses.

Pete
and Debbie are both turning 40, though only Pete will admit to it; as
the movie opens, the couple are having birthday sex in the shower,
and Debbie, on discovering that Pete used Viagra, screams at him.
Debbie has a deep fear of aging. She works out her taut body
relentlessly with her personal trainer (Jason Segel), who reassures
her that if she were his girlfriend, he wouldn't need Viagra (“You
give me a boner!” is the movie's idea of hilarity.) The couple have
two daughters, Sadie and Charlotte, played by the young Apatows,
Maude and Iris. The daughters were also featured in KNOCKED UP and
FUNNY PEOPLE. THIS IS 40
allows the older girl, Maude, the spotlight, giving her several
emotional speeches that demonstrate her seriously limited acting
ability.

The
couple are dealing with financial problems resulting from Pete's
decision to leave a comfortable job with Sony to start his own record
label, where he can produce recordings by the bands he worshiped in
his youth. (They nonetheless spend quite freely.) Currently, Pete is heavily invested in a reunion of
the (boring and superannuated) Graham Parker and the
Rumour, and won't take his wife's advice to sign a hot teenage girl
singer “so we can eat.” The failing record venture, along with
the $80,000 he's lent his endlessly mooching divorced dad (Albert
Brooks), may force the couple to sell their massive home – a fact
Pete is concealing from Debbie.

Debbie
owns a clothing boutique where seems to show up infrequently, enough
only to notice that one of her employees – either vampy, slutty
Megan Fox or mousy Charlyne Yi – has stolen $12,000. This is one of
numerous subplots (there's also one about Pete's dad's unlikely second family
of young triplet boys) that lead nowhere, or at least nowhere funny.
The couple also must deal with their daughters' Apple-induced
electronic fixations – the older daughter is hooked on episodes of
Lost (not funny), and
her texts and Facebook conversations with a boy raise Debbie's
concerns. At one point, Debbie confronts and threatens to “fuck up”
the boy she thinks insulted her daughter, leading to an also-not-funny
confrontation with the boy's mother (Melissa McCarthy, who does what
she can with the anemic script).

On and
on it goes, without any particular direction and with a lot of
screaming and pointless vulgarity along the way. The movie's nadir might be when Pete, naked
and legs aloft, tries to enlist Debbie in examining his rectum for
hemorrhoids. Debbie's amusingly arch response (“Can we preserve just one shred of mystery?”) can't redeem the awfulness of this
scene, which depicts something done by no couple, ever.

And
that's a problem for this movie. Whereas there are moments that are
recognizably realistic – the daughters' endless bickering,
Debbie's frosty relationship with her estranged father (John Lithgow)
– most of the movie is trivial and annoying. Wealthy people whining
about money, presented without ironic distance, is not exactly
moving, and without the leavening of good jokes, it's a long,
screechy disaster.

We expected far more from our erstwhile hero. To
borrow from the musical Oklahoma, “Poor Judd is (Creatively) Dead.” 1 1/2 out of 4 stars.